Heroes Among Us

Home is the place where, when you go there, they have to take you in

Robert Frost

This weekend Utah celebrates July 24^th–Pioneer Day. It marks the date that Brigham Young declared “this” (the Salt Lake Valley) as “the place,”–a safe retreat for the converts who were fleeing persecution in the East after practicing the religion revealed to Joseph Smith in 1820. It was a long, weary trek, with starvation, disease, and death marking the path they traveled until they finally arrived in what they hoped would be a  permanent haven for their new homes. I have ancestors on both sides who were there looking over the desolate valley alongside Brigham Young. Assuming their genetic coding wasn’t markedly different from mine, I can imagine them shaking their heads at the impossibility of a future in such a place–but weary enough to keep their mouths shut because they’d already walked 2500 miles and couldn’t consider lifting one foot in front of another to go even a single additional step. Perhaps there is a point in each of our lives when we all feel that contradiction. I did what I had to do, but I was no hero.

A couple of weeks ago, Daughter #2 and her husband walked on the beaches of Normandy—a long held dream of my son-in-law whose passion is history. They retraced the footsteps of the Allied invasion on D-Day which marked the beginning of the end of WWII. My dad and two of his brothers fought in that war. One uncle was a Navy cook in the Pacific fleet, one a fighter pilot in Europe, and my dad, a navigator/bombardier flying bombing missions over the “Himalayan hump” from India to Japan. Once in a while, when the brothers were together—usually very late at night, they’d tell the stories of their war experiences, their voices always tinged with amazement that each of them had managed to come home. Never did they speak of themselves as heroes. That was always a designation reserved for someone with whom they served. And yet, in a box of keepsakes at the back of my closet, I have the medals my dad won for his military service—including not one, but two Distinguished Flying Crosses.

I’ve lived long enough to know that every person has a story. When I was a teacher, I used to assign my senior English classes to interview someone they knew personally who had participated in a war. My classes uniformly groaned when they heard that they had to turn each interview into a research paper and a presentation for the class. But those presentations were filled with wonder: a grandfather who had been a Nazi in WWII, escaped to the U. S., married, raised a family–now for the first time admitting his involvement in the war to his grandchild. A nurse who served in Viet Nam treating horrific casualties from the brutal gorilla warfare. A tail gunner whose turret was blown off of the plane into the sea—and survived. My students and I were mesmerized.

One of my goals was to teach them that every life has a unique story of its own. All around them were people building stories of heroism. The Latina student who came racing into my classroom to tell me she had won a scholarship to the University of Utah and would be in the first in her family to go to college. Another year two girls in the same class who were chosen for a prestigious early admission engineering program. The student body president who in his graduation speech acknowledged his three years in a Sudanese refuge camp as a young child. The valedictorian who thanked his parents for their courage in loading their family on a boat and becoming part of the flood of  Vietnamese Boat People, refugees who fled their country after the war and dared the ocean instead of letting their children be caught up in the shambles left at home. Or the boy who survived a nightmare skiing accident the winter of his junior year, vowing that he would walk again in time to receive his diploma. He had a crutch on each arm, but I was there the day he kept that promise.

Pioneers, soldiers, parents, students. All of them ordinary people just taking one step at a time–doing what they felt had to be done every day. Yesterday I looked up the definition of hero: someone admired, or idealized for courage, outstanding achievements, or noble qualities. It’s clear to me there are heroes all around us. We just need to be paying attention.